This man made me want to write.
I know, obscure article. Odd subject matter. I am obscure and odd. It’s alright. We all are in our own way. I will get back to it. I always do.
Michael O’Donoghue.
The same man that wrote this.
There was another article of his that was 100 curses from other countries.
And the one I remember was Arabic.
“May you own a hotel with a thousand rooms and may you be found dead in every one of them.”
Brutal.
I grew up in a tiny white bread town where all people of other ethnicities fit perfectly into stereotypical roles. Two families from China… both owned Chinese restaurants. Muslim family ran the convenience store. Seriously, that was it. 3, maybe 4 families that weren’t white.
My only knowledge of the outside world came from National Geographic, books, movies, the occasional Amnesty International or UNICEF ad on TV. And a collection of curses in the back of a SPIN magazine.
The world seemed like a big scary place, overwhelming and really far away.
I was never taught by any member of my family (or church) that I was superior to anyone because of my skin color or gender or religious practices. I still hold those truths to be self-evident.
Evidentially they are not.
I am blessed/cursed with an amazing memory.
I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I remember when Russia was the enemy.
I remember the execution of Biko and Mandela finally being freed.
I remember both Desert Storms.
I remember 9/11.
I remember what I was doing when all of those things happened.
Always safely tucked inside a house that was NOT being bombed, feeling broken, helpless and completely disconnected. Always feeling like the world was going crazy but then going about my safe little life.
I remember Rwanda, holding my own child at my breast and bawling my eyes out, as a baby clung to her dead mother while someone filmed it for the news. Screaming at the TV for someone to do something.
I AM SOMEONE.
Seems ludicrous now, the choices I made. The precarious positions I put myself in. The resources I wasted being a blind consumer. The poison I took to drown out my ridiculous perception of what pain is.
Buffalo Bill was right I “don’t know what pain is.”
I thought I did. I suffered pretty severe depression and anxiety for the better part of a decade.
I felt myself slipping back there over the last 10 days.
Arguing screaming fighting with those who just want to argue scream and fight. I was hating the haters.
I decided to stop.
I see the truth and I am obligated to speak it.
Bring on the overwhelm.
It would be easier to run. Go to Wal-Mart, buy a bunch of shit I don’t need and feed the monster. Keep believing the world is flat and the sun revolves around us.
But I cannot.
The disconnect was a bygone bliss also known as ignorance.
Biker Body Pillow once said I had a really good memory and was able to make connections and decipher patterns. I see them now.
This is the most afraid I have ever been.
I read about Charles Manson and Jim Jones. I watched Waco happen.
Opportunistic Butchers.
HISTORY IS REPEATING.
The French Government has publicly stated that they believe the one passport found after the bombings in Paris that belonged to a Syrian refugee was planted by the bombers in attempt to sway the world view on allowing refugees into their countries.
Congratulations. They won.
After World War I the Treaty of Versailles was signed imposing economic sanctions against Germany, and taking land. Germany was war torn, shell shocked and ignored and shunned by the entire world. Like locking a toddler in a room after a rather destructive and terrifying temper tantrum and then leaving them there forever.
The options always come down to fight or die.
In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.
When I say Germany I mean a specific set of lines that define the borders of a country, but also the people who live there inside those borders. If you leave people weak and starving and ignored they will cleave to anyone that promises them a way out of the dark. Even a madman.
“Psychiatrist Carl Jung commented in 1938 that Hitler is the “first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the World War”. Hitler used personal magnetism and an understanding of crowd psychology to advantage while engaged in public speaking. Historians have noted the hypnotic effect of his rhetoric on large audiences, and of his eyes in small groups. The author Alfons Heck, a former member of the Hitler Youth, describes the reaction to a speech by Hitler:
We erupted into a frenzy of nationalistic pride that bordered on hysteria. For minutes on end, we shouted at the top of our lungs, with tears streaming down our faces: Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul.— Alfons Heck (source, Wikipedia)
This is the Holocaust round two. Now with added craziness and carnage and much shinier, scarier weapons.
Syria and its people are bombed out, starving, shell shocked, lost.
The world is turning its back on them because they look like the people that are firing on them.
If we do not give them somewhere to run to their options will be only fight or die.
The ones who want them to fight are a handful of barbaric evil men with guns and bombs.
We are feeding the war machine and the recruitment pool when we shut refugees out.
We are taking away their option to thrive and leaving them with only survival.
They will fight. It is human nature.
WE DID THIS. THIS IS OUR MESS.
We made people into monsters and now we are hiding under the bed?
A trillion dollars spent blowing shit up, sending American citizens to war just to ignore the mess after it’s made.
Millions of homeless veterans and refugees. Yet the banks made $30 000 000 000.00 last year. 1.8 million homes sitting empty due to foreclosures by the very same banks and we don’t have the resources to fix this?
STOP IT.
Get the people out and to safety. Let the terrorists live in the mess they made. I do not see this to be a difficult solution.
Funny how the only sense being made of the state of the world is satyr.
I miss Michael O’Donoghue.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke
This is the truth and there are consequences. In 1993 Kevin Carter photographed a toddler trying to make it to a feeding station in Sudan, a hooded vulture had landed nearby. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it. He was told not to touch the child for fear of transmitting disease and her fate is unknown. His however, is that after ‘doing his job’ he committed suicide a year later.
He was 33 years old. He died by carbon monoxide poisoning. These are his last words.
“I’m really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist… depressed … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken* if I am that lucky.”
If I didn’t say something or do something I feel like I would be ripping myself away from the human race. I cannot do that. To do so is death.
We have to stop it or live with the fact that we did nothing. That is not a life I want.
Michael O’Donoghue’s quote stands as well. The world is a minefield.
I happen to be lucky enough that where my soul chose to land they are few and far between.
There but by the grace of God go I. My heart is breaking with the things that break the heart of God.
This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine.
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” ― Fred Rogers
I am donating $500 to sponsor a family from Syria.
I need nothing and as a human being I have to help.
Stop hating what you don’ understand and
Vote. Sponsor. Donate.
*Ken Oosterbroek was a fellow war journalist who “was shot and killed by peacekeepers in Thokoza Township, about 25 km east of Johannesburg, on 18 April – nine days before the 27 April 1994 elections in South Africa, the country’s first all-race elections. He and other photographers were covering a clash between peacekeepers and the African National Congress when the peacekeepers opened fire and shot Oosterbroek and fellow Bang-Bang Club member Greg Marinovich.” (Wikipedia)
